May We All Be Happy and Create the Causes for Future Happiness

Dear Family,
While I find War to be disgusting and barbaric, and, in this case in Iraq, it's all about the blood of our sons and daughters for a barrel of oil. Similarly, in Afghanistan, I suggest that it's all about the blood of our sons and daughters for a field of poppies. Yet those like our Lee have not been made privy to this. They truly believe they are helping and noble. Their intentions are pure, and they have not been allowed to question Authority. Just to worry about the Marine next to you. Eventually, years from now, they may come to realize the Truth.
However, Lee is extremely brave, physically powerful and possesses a rare intelligence.
If one's intention is pure, and one is being ordered to kill, it is not as bad karmically . . . this advice came to my Chris in the monastery's meditation room from my Root Guru Ven, Geshela Lobsang Sopa before Chris left for the Marines in March 2004. Geshela then blessed Chris as I do every day for Lee
peace, love to all,
mickey

mickey's review of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism

Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism, while written in 2005, offers a wisdom that, had we in the U.S. heeded back in the militaristic era of the Vietnam War, might have diverted the awful consequences of our collective negative karma that was the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.

The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Ven. Thich Nhat Hanh is the author of many beautifully simple books both lucid and approachable for Western Dharma practitioners. The term “engaged Buddhism” may have originated with his human rights work in his own war-torn country of Vietnam in the 1960s. The Zen monk’s efforts towards peace and non-violence were attempts to actively apply Buddhist tenets of compassion and mindfulness to impact social change. He was recognized in the west in 1967 when Dr. Martin Luther King, himself a student of Mahatma Gandhi Lama, nominated the monk for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Chapter One, “Uprooting Terrorism,” the monk describes how he was searched by security guards at the Los Angeles International Airport as he arrived with 120 of his monastic students on their way to a retreat for transformation and healing. The extremely personal intrusion led him to realize the guards “ . . . were not looking for my Buddha nature, they were looking for my terrorist nature. . . . When a civilization comes to this level of fear, it is going in the wrong direction.” Yet how did we, the American people, evolve to this extreme of delusion and paranoia in this most prosperous country in the world?

The angered call to America’s youth for retaliation proclaimed a “War on Terror.” An entire generation responded to fill the ranks of the military. Truly now, “we terrorize others so that they will have no chance to terrorize us. We want to kill before we are killed.” This monk claims that what the military training soldiers going to Iraq receive “makes them lose their humanity” and so “the torture and abuse these soldiers engaged in is the direct result . . . [Y]oung men [and women] going to Iraq arrive there already full of fear, wanting to protect themselves at all costs, pressured by their superiors to be aggressive . . . and be ready to kill at any moment.” This statement is affirmed in the deadly cry of marching Marine Corps soldiers as they bellow out the Turkish word for “Kill!”

Thich Naht Hanh offers hands-on solutions for receding from this collective afflictive state, and continually reminds the reader that the only possibility for social change rests in one’s personal commitment to inner transformation. Deep listening, mindfulness through watching the breath, open the individual to awareness of our complicity in the current epidemic of worldwide suffering. Through these meditative techniques, we begin to understand how our negative over-consumption--via all our senses--has prompted hatred from severely deprived people in other countries. With this understanding we begin to cultivate compassionate generosity, mindful healthy consumption of nourishment and renunciation of our habits of greed.

Listening to those we are attacking, listening to the poor and voiceless, listening to the sages . . . with quiet hearts and open minds: this is Thich Naht Hanh’s precious teaching. O that every soldier chose this little book for protective armor!

I-less in Cincinnati

Yes, today may be Saturday, November 15, 2008, the 18th day of the 9th Pig moon, but those are only conditions, not reality, neither relative nor ultimate, but only conditions. The conditions are not the moment's identity any more than this "I" is the moment's identity . . . the moment is gone. The moment of 12:58pm is gone. Did it exist? Time is now 1:08 pm. There is a mickey who feels depressed and confused here at this glass table facing west, the directional condition of Death, a cultural condition at that. Wet, gray skies are cut into framed pieces by three tall bay windows. This mickey wrote in this very space in October and November of 1978 . . . 30 years ago when she thought she owned a wholly different array of things, car, clothes, youth . . . that now have been traded in for a comfy bed, an altar with a Tara statue, a laptop computer. She's spent 30 years bartering and trading in the flea market of life. And every time the cell phone rings, with its caller ID, she thinks for a moment who she should be for that person; did she do as she should have since their last call, thus fulfilling their expectations of her identity? She doesn't want to disappoint anyone, so here, at 56 years old in this particular lifetime, she dances to anyone's bullets at her feet.

She dreams night after night,year after year of losing her wallet, losing her driver's license, losing her passport, losing her handbag, losing control . . . not being able to carry her important possessions by herself, how they keep dribbling away when she reaches for them, how the wind blasts a newly-raked pile of leaves. The waste of it all! And the great anxiety around those she most disappoints, to whose standards she has yet to live up to: her mother, her monk Teachers, her father, her friends, her son . . . the list is endless. And the expectations she perceives that they have of her makes her want to run away, or, swallow pills to help her fake it if there's no way out. Of course she wants out. The horror of Jonathan's suicide by pills come too close. She could not do this to herself . . . never to her son . . . because she understood its utter futility as a solution to such pain, but she understands the condition of his mind at that time and the desperate hope that life was linear, with a beginning point and an end point to suffering. Misinformation! He went to the miserable realms yet again because of misinformation!

And her? How does this life operate on misinformation? She thinks she should be a good daughter, a good Buddhist, a good nun, a good writer, a good mother, a good Teacher, a good Dharma practitioner, a good student, a good Tarot reader, a good scholar, a good publicist, a good editor, a good dancer, with a good body, a good-looking person. All she wants to do is fly away from under the weight of these self-imposed identities. She grasps at each one of her, desperately trying to prove to herself and the other that she is the best volunteer, the hardest, most selfless worker. What a joke! What an oxymoron! The ego working overtime to be selfless!

She has no idea who "I" am other than what others expect of her. But isn't that the point? She is not an "I". When you point your finger at her to touch her, it is like touching air because she is none of those things, yet all of those things manifest out of this nothingness, this emptiness.

And here come Mom up the steps to deliver what she bought for her at Trader Joe's. Is she looking daughterly enough? Intelligent, diligent enough because she's writing here, looking like the scene from a movie of the impassioned writer whose floor is covered with balled-up pieces of paper, evidence of the frustrated beginnings over and over? Yet she only has wadded tissue that missed the basket as she continuously blows her nose in the gray wet cold of a Cincinnati November day.

And all "I" meant to write was: The only identity, is if there is one at all, is the path, the actual process of the journey. The path is big, huge and replete with a clutter of conditions, themselves created by an infinitude of decisions made by free will. Will the real mickey please stand up? We all stand up. We all stay seated.

Birds and the Green Party

7th day of 10th Pig (Sow . . . Phagmo) moon, 2135 Earth Mouse Year

Wednesday, November 5, 2008       10:40am

Here it is: facing west, writing in front of an open window, lovely fall breeze billowing the sheer purple strips of cloth left by the former tenant of Mom's second-floor tiny one-bedroom apartment (Brenda, the black opera singer whose creativity is everywhere) . . . some far off construction drone fails to drown out the sweet chirps of birds visiting each other at the tops of 150- to 200-year-old chestnut (in the Buckeye state) and maple(?) trees between Mom's two huge Victorian mansions . . . clear symbols of her worldly accomplishment in this lifetime. I didn't intend to move back to this memory-besieged apartment, but the intention to bring happiness and aid and to repay the kindness of my mother brought me here October 1, 2008. I am accepting the wounds and wars of the past and moving on. It is a daily, moment-by-moment task not to be self-involved and only seeking my own pleasure. I fail often, but a little less each day. I suppose it is the skill of mindfulness that I am cultivating (I like that word).

I don't know who won the presidential election. I voted, mostly for show, for Mom's and Allen's sake. I left everything blank except for Cynthia McKinney, running in my professed Green Party. Then I voted for the single person running for coroner, and, because my second of two ballot sheets got kicked back out of the scanner because it was blank, I voted for a reduction in interest rates at paycheck loan places.

Nothing is different today (well, of course everything is different in an impermanent universe) but these purple veil drapes are no lighter or darker because McCain or Obama won. I don't want to turn on the TV to find out. Maybe I should call Allen or Mom or Bonnie to give someone the pleasure of telling me the surprise. I feel remote from the high anxiety of it all. Whoever won, I'm glad it's over and we can now turn our focus to the cruelly-neglected poor and besieged beings of the world.

The last two nights, I have had wonderfully unusual dreams. I know I am talking out loud in response. Two nights ago, Katie Laur, the local country singer and DJ at WNKU, gave me a long, hour-long "teaching" without words. I never nodded my head or said anything. I didn't see her, but I "heard" her in my head in a language without words. I think the teaching was a biography of Luigi's (my old jazz dance teacher in New York) life. . . .

Embracing Life, Embracing Death

from Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Chapter 14, "The Practices of Dying"

I remember how people would often come to see my master, Jamyang Khyentse, simply to ask for his guidance for the moment of death. He was so loved and revered throughout Tibet, especially in the eastern province of Kham, that some would travel for months on end to meet him and get his blessing just once before they died. All my masters would give this as their advice, for this is the essence of what is needed as you come to die: "Be free of attachment and aversion. Keep your mind pure. And unite your mind with the Buddha."

The whole Buddhist attitude to the moment of death can be summed up in this one verse by Padmasambhava from the cycle of the Tibetan Book of the Dead:

Now when the bardo of dying dawns upon me,

I will abandon all grasping, yearning and attachment,

Enter undistracted in clear awareness of the teaching,

And eject my consciousness into the space of unborn Rigpa;

As I leave this compound body of flesh and blood

I will know it to be a transitory illusion.

At the moment of death, there are two things that count: Whatever we have done in our lives, and what state of mind we are in at that moment. Even if we have accumulated a lot of negative karma, if we are able really to make a change of heart at the moment, it can decisively influence our future and transform our karma, for the moment of death is an exceptionally powerful opportunity for purifying karma.

The Moment of Death

Remember that all the habits and tendencies that are stored in the ground of our ordinary mind are lying ready to be activated by any influence. Even now we know how it only takes the slightest provocation to prompt our instinctive, habitual reactions to surface. This is especially true at the moment of death. The Dalai Lama explains:

"At the time of death, attitudes of long familiarity usually take precedence and direct the rebirth. For this same reason, strong attachment is generated for the self, since one fears that one's self is becoming nonexistent. This attachment serves as the connecting link to the intermediate state between lives, the liking for a body in turn acts as a cause establishing the body of the intermediate (bardo) being."

Therefore our state of mind at death is all-important. If we die in a positive frame of mind, we can improve our next birth, despite our negative karma. And if we are upset and distressed, it may have a detrimental effect, even though we may have used our lives well. This means that "the last thought and emotion that we have before we die has an extremely powerful determining effect on our immediate future." Just as the mind of a mad person is usually entirely occupied by one obsession, which returns again and again, so at the moment of death our minds are totally vulnerable and exposed to whatever thoughts then preoccupy us. That last thought or emotion we have can be magnified out of all proportion and flood our whole perception. This is why the masters stress that the quality of the atmosphere around us when we die is crucial. With our friends and relatives, we should do all we can to inspire positive emotions and sacred feelings, like love, compassion, and devotion, and all we can to help them to "let go of grasping, yearning, and attachment."

Letting Go of Attachment

The ideal way for a person to die is having given away everything, internally and externally, so that there is as little as possible yearning, grasping, and attachment for the mind at that essential moment to latch onto. So before we die we should try to free ourselves of attachment to all our possessions, friends, and loved ones. We cannot take anything with us, so we should make plans to give all our belongings beforehand as gifts or offerings to charity.

In Tibet the masters, before they left their bodies, would indicate what they would like to offer to other teachers. sometimes a master who was intending to reincarnate in the future would leave a particular group of objects for his reincarnation, giving a clear indication of what he wanted to leave. I am convinced that we should also be exact about who is going to receive our possessions or our money. These wishes should be expressed as lucidly as possible. If they are not, then after you die, if you are in the bardo of becoming, you will see your relatives squabbling over your goods or misusing your money, and this will disturb you. State precisely just how much of your money should be dedicated to charity, or different spiritual purposes, or given to each of your relatives. Making everything clear, down to the final details, will reassure you and help you truly to let go.

As I have said, it is essential that the atmosphere around when we die should be as peaceful as possible. The Tibetan masters therefore advise that grieving friends and relatives should not be present at a dying person's bedside, in case they provoke a disturbing emotion at the moment of death. Hospice workers have told me that dying people sometimes request that their close family do not visit them just as they are dying, because of this very fear of evoking painful feelings and strong attachment in the dying person, which make it harder than ever for him or her to let go.

It is extremely hard not to cry when we are at the bedside of someone we love who is dying. I advise everyone to do their best to work out attachment and grief with the dying person before death comes: Cry together, express your love, and say goodbye, but try to finish with this process before the actual moment of death arrives. If possible, it is best if friends and relatives do not show excessive grief at the moment of death, because the consciousness of the dying person is at that moment exceptionally vulnerable. The Tibetan Book of the Dead says that your crying and tears around a person's bedside are experienced like thunder and hail. But don't worry if you have found yourself weeping at a deathbed; it can't be helped, and there is no reason to upset yourself and to feel guilty.

Welcoming Voices of Truth, Voices of Compassion

The difficulty of sustaining empathy in a time of seemingly perpetual bombardment of anger and hatred, is my greatest struggle, and I believe it is a universal struggle. I am no different from any other living being on this planet. In these United States, we don't really believe that our lives could be snuffed out in a second, that the next exhalation of breath could be our last . . . this is the final frontier between me and death. Yet if I were an Iraqi woman, or an Afghan woman, or a Somalian woman, or a Haitian woman, et. al., I would surely sob in great joy and wonder at the water tumbling out of the kitchen sink as I wash dinner dishes. We are losing our perspective on the massive suffering going on in the world . . . we have been coaxed into a lethargy of blind unconcern because we are all sated with the goods plundered from the poorest on earth who are left to die. We must acknowledge this death-filled era. We must look death full in the face of it. We must see the truth of death. And only then can we turn to its cause . . . everything has a cause. If we can dismantle the cause . . . what kind of world would we have? I am suggesting only non-violent dismantlings. O Gandhi! Arise like a Lazarus and lead us now! O Martin Luther King, we so need a Good King like you! Help us to see the truth, speak the truth, walk the true path of healing. It is never too late to purify bad karma from the most heinous actions. It is possible . . . there is good reason to hope.